Last Updated on June 16, 2026 by Michael
You should not use a torch to remove hemorrhoids.
That sentence should have ended the conversation. Yet somewhere on Earth, a grown adult is right now eyeing the warranty card on a Bernzomatic and squinting like a man with a plan.
Roughly 26% of humans are walking around with hemorrhoids at this exact moment. Approximately zero of them belong in the welding aisle of Home Depot.
Hemorrhoids are swollen veins. Swollen veins do not respond to threats, intimidation, or open flame. They are not impressed by your hardware collection, your YouTube research, or the otherwise strong start to your weekend.
Your Ass Is Not a Crème Brûlée
The instinct to torch a problem comes from a primal place. Fire fixed mammoths. Fire fixed wet jeans.
Fire has never once been hired by humanity, despite its long résumé in many other fields, to address swollen vascular tissue anywhere near a sphincter.
The area in question is not coated in caramelized sugar waiting for a kitchen blowtorch to finish the job. It is the most nerve-rich neighborhood the human body operates.
A single inflamed grape down there can generate more dramatic monologue than the entire genre of Italian opera.
Setting it on fire is not a shortcut. It is the most expensive way ever invented to ruin a Tuesday.
About half of adults over 50 will host one of these unwelcome grapes at some point. Statistically none of them belong anywhere near a tool that needs a striker to ignite.
Fire Has a Résumé, and Proctology Is Not On It
Fire is excellent at heating soup.
It is also excellent at intimidating wolves, scaring children at summer camp, and rescuing dates that were otherwise going absolutely nowhere.
Fire is not, and has never been, excellent at the kind of delicate vascular work involved in tending to swollen veins in the most intimate parts of the human anatomy.
A standard propane torch can burn as hot as 2,000°C at its adiabatic flame temperature. Human skin starts taking irreversible damage at around 44°C.
That is not a small mismatch. That is bringing a weapon designed to bend steel to a body part that flinches at the wrong brand of toilet paper.
The phrase “I will be precise with this” has never once been spoken truthfully by a man holding a propane torch with his pants around his ankles.
The torch has its own plans. The torch is not on your team.
The Triage Nurse Has Seen Things, But Not Quite This
Every year, roughly 486,000 Americans turn up at emergency rooms with burn injuries, according to the American Burn Association.
Most got there honestly. Grease fires. Hot pans. The eternal mystery of the curling iron.
The ones who arrived via DIY hemorrhoid removal carry three things at intake: a burn, an explanation, and a personality they have to permanently retire by Tuesday morning.
The nurse will not laugh. She is a professional.
She will, however, go home, pour one extremely large glass of wine, and tell exactly one trusted friend.
That friend will never look at a crème brûlée the same way.
The intake form has a box labeled “mechanism of injury.” A person in scrubs is about to write a sentence into your permanent medical record that will outlive every relationship you have ever had.
Insurance Will Have Several Questions
Health insurance underwriters have processed strange claims. Trampoline incidents. Lawn mower geometry failures. The entire surrealist catalog of zip-line.
What they have not seen in volume is “self-administered cauterization of perianal varicosities via consumer-grade combustion appliance.”
That phrase pulls three adjusters into a meeting nobody wanted to be in.
The call that follows uses a tone of voice not yet officially named.
It hovers between disbelief, professional curiosity, and the specific pity reserved for grown men who own one torch and zero instincts for self-preservation.
Cauterization Is Real, But It Happens With Pants On
A faint sliver of logic does live beneath the worst idea anyone has ever had. Doctors actually do use heat to shrink hemorrhoidal tissue.
The procedure is called infrared coagulation. It takes about thirty seconds. It is performed by a human being who spent 12 years in school earning the right to do it.
Not 12 minutes on YouTube during a single inspired Saturday morning. Twelve calendar years, with crushing debt, brutal board exams, and supervised practice on patients who actually consented.
The device is not sold at Home Depot. It does not have a trigger. It does not come with a complimentary cylinder of MAP gas.
It is a clinical instrument approximately as similar to a propane torch as a scalpel is to a chainsaw.
Both technically cut. Only one is approved for use on the human posterior.
Recreating that procedure in a garage is like attempting LASIK with a laser pointer borrowed from a Holiday Inn conference room.
The result is not savings. The result is a man with one eye left and a podcast nobody asked for.
The Hemorrhoid Heals Itself. The Burn Becomes Folklore.
About nine out of ten hemorrhoids quietly resolve within a week of mild intervention. They are common, temporary, and rarely worth more than nine dollars of pharmacy aisle attention.
A burn to the exact same neighborhood does not heal in a week.
It heals over months, sometimes involving skin grafts performed by people who graduated from medical school instead of from a YouTube playlist.
The hemorrhoid would have packed up and left on its own. The burn becomes a chapter in your obituary that your kids will pretend they never read at family gatherings.
What Actually Works (And None of It Requires Ventilation)
A warm sitz bath for 10 to 15 minutes, two or three times a day, takes care of most flare-ups.
A sitz bath is a small basin you fill with warm water and sit in. It is the only chair in your house that becomes less attractive once you understand its job description.
Witch hazel pads. Hydrocortisone cream. A drugstore bottle of ibuprofen.
That is the entire civilian arsenal. None of it whistles. None of it requires a fire extinguisher in the next room. None of it asks you to sign a waiver before opening the box.
None of it sets off the smoke detector. None of it needs a permit.
Fiber and water prevent most repeat visits. Stop straining like you are trying to deadlift a Buick onto the porch and the situation largely sorts itself out.
The body has been managing this condition for four million years. It does not need a corporate sponsor in the welding industry.
The Cleveland Clinic also warns against home remedies people swear by, including apple cider vinegar, which it specifically describes as a substance that worsens inflammation rather than relieving it.
If apple cider vinegar is considered too reckless, take a wild swing at where propane lands on the safety chart.
When to Actually See a Doctor
If symptoms outlast a week of warm water and patience, see a colorectal specialist.
That word — “colorectal” — exists because an entire branch of medicine is devoted to this exact region of the human body.
You are not the first person to develop this condition. The peer-reviewed literature documents hemorrhoid cases on basically every continent.
Your case is not novel. Your case is also not interesting enough to merit improvisation.
Real treatment options include rubber band ligation, which is exactly as undignified as it sounds, and a surgical procedure called hemorrhoidectomy.
Both happen under anesthesia, by professionals, in a building with working fire alarms.
A specialist consult costs significantly less than a stay in a burn unit, which can climb into six figures in the time it takes to fill out the admission paperwork.
A Brief Word From the Ancient Egyptians
Hemorrhoids predate civilization. So does the wisdom to leave them alone.
The Egyptians, who mummified their own organs in decorative jars and worshipped a beetle they believed pushed the sun across the sky, did not torch the area. They tried other dumb things. Not that one.
If combustion seems reasonable, sit down instead. Do not stand up holding an ignition source.
The grape is temporary. The story is forever.
Recent Posts
Here is the truth, served straight and unsalted: you probably cannot stop eating Pringles before you finish the can. Nobody can. The few saints who claim otherwise are lying, or they have simply...
How to Get Your Security Deposit Back After Keeping a Miniature Horse Indoors
You kept a horse indoors. A small one. It was still a horse, and your apartment will never forget it. Now the lease is ending, and your landlord is clutching your deposit like the last lifeboat...